2026 NFL FLAG Championships land on ESPN and ABC with 350-plus teams

More than 350 girls and boys teams will converge on Droplight Grand Park Sports Campus in Westfield, Indiana, when the third annual NFL FLAG Championships Presented by Toyota run July 23-26, with championship games set for Sunday, July 26. The event lands on ESPN and ABC with a broad broadcast footprint that signals how quickly flag football is being packaged as a national TV property, not just a youth tournament.

The NFL says the championships will be hosted by the NFL, ESPN and RCX Sports and will bring together regional champions from all 32 NFL clubs along with international teams from around the world. ESPN will return on-site to broadcast and stream Boys 14U, High School Girls and International division games across the weekend, with live coverage scheduled across ESPN, ESPN2, ESPN on ABC, ESPN+, ESPN Deportes, NFL+ and Disney platforms. That reach turns the weekend into more than a bracket chase; it gives the sport a national stage in prime time and on streaming windows built for repeat viewing.

The setting matches the ambition. Grand Park Sports Campus spans more than 400 acres and includes more than 30 multi-purpose fields, giving the championships a festival-style footprint that can handle the swelling field of entrants. The 2026 tournament is the biggest yet, topping the roughly 300 teams and 3,000 players that filled the 2025 event in Canton, Ohio. ESPN, Disney and the NFL combined to reach 7.7 million fans across the 2025 championships, a figure that gives broadcasters a clear benchmark as the event grows.

Toyota’s role also reflects the business case around flag football’s rise. The company says its NFL FLAG partnership connected more than 835,000 boys and girls through national tournaments and local league play in 2025, and it has set a goal of reaching 1 million athletes in 2026. That scale matters because the championships now sit at the center of a pipeline that stretches from local leagues to regional qualifiers and, increasingly, to media-rights value.

The timing is just as important as the numbers. Flag football entered the Los Angeles 2028 Olympic program in 2023, and the NCAA added the sport to its Emerging Sports for Women program in January 2026. Those milestones give the Westfield championship a sharper purpose: it is no longer only crowning age-group winners, but showcasing a sport with a growing path to college recognition, Olympic visibility and mainstream broadcast credibility.